Found treasure

DETROIT (AP) ? It reads like somebody's get-rich fantasy: An old painting in a high school faculty lounge turns out to be the work of one of the biggest names in post-war African-American art.

The Detroit News

DETROIT (AP) — It reads like somebody's get-rich fantasy: An old painting in a high school faculty lounge turns out to be the work of one of the biggest names in post-war African-American art.

"Two Figures and Landscape" by Hughie Lee-Smith hung, unrecognized, for the past 20 years or so at Warren's Fitzgerald High School.

"It's a great little story," says Fitzgerald Public Schools Supt. Barbara Van Sweden. "This small district in Warren discovers it houses a wonderful painting by a well-known artist."

Indeed, had a former student not shared his hunch with an administrator two years ago, the painting would still doubtless be at Fitzgerald. Instead, today it's joined other works by Lee-Smith in the DIA's suite of galleries devoted to African-American art — on extended loan from the district.

Lee-Smith is important, says curator and head of the General Motors Center for African American Art Valerie J. Mercer, as an early modernist "who depicts the urban environment, which is central to a lot of the African-American experience."

The artist, who died in 1999 at 83, was born in Eustis, Fla., but moved to Detroit for a while after World War II, taking classes at the old Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies) and getting his bachelor of arts degree at Wayne State University.

CCS artist and art professor Gilda Snowden ranks the one-time Detroiter "right at the top" of post-war artists who touched on the African-American experience.

"He's so singular," she says, noting that Lee-Smith had the courage to paint realistic figures "at a time when abstract expressionism was all the rage. But he knew, and felt, his way of working."

The State Department's "Art in Embassies" program describes the artist on its Web site as "a realistic and yet magical painter who is intimately concerned with the loneliness of decaying urban life."

Fame would strike after Lee-Smith left Detroit for New York, but this city still has a claim on much of his earliest work. Indeed, the artist's painting "The Piper" won the DIA's Founders Society Prize for local artists in 1953 — one year before "Two Figures and Landscape" was finished.

Once the school district became aware it might be sitting on something remarkable, it contacted the museum.

"The painting definitely looked like a Hughie," Mercer says, "and it was signed. So there was nothing really puzzling about it."

Mercer adds that the museum will have "Two Figures" for about a year. After that, the school district could take it back or extend the loan another year.

As with so many precious works, however, the painting's exact provenance is hard to pin down. How or why it landed at a Warren school in the first place is shrouded in mystery, though the assumption is that it must have been a gift.

Even the specifics behind that former student's suspicion that this might be a Lee-Smith are at least momentarily lost to history.

"Unfortunately," says Van Sweden, "we don't know the student's name. And the staffer he spoke to has left the district."

All the same, this little story is a win-win for everyone. The DIA gets temporary custody of an intriguing early work by a major artist and the school district gets the glory associated with a remarkable discovery — and its public-spiritedness in loaning the work.

For her part, Van Sweden said the museum was "very generous." Not only did the DIA authenticate the work for free, it also had its conservation department clean it.

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